the main advantage of the wikidot chatroom over all others is the ability to "watch" (which i use more than anything else)
the main disadvantage over embeded is that you have no idea that anyone is on line.
but then you would have to be on the embed chat page constantly to see if anything is happening.

My vision was to use your "skinny" chat in the side bar and then we would set our status to "online" on our mentor page and just leave the window open in the background. Then we'd hear an audible alert if someone popped in and asked for help. Would this work?

As I recall, I don't hear the new post sound in FF when the chatroom window doesn't have the focus, but it does work with IE if it's running in the background.

I favour using the Wikidot chatroom, but this doesn't get over the need to have an external solution like DinDin for voice, screen sharing and video demonstrations. Unless,that is, we can set James off on an other project to create Wikidot versions of these:)

I wouldn't mind using the regular Wikidot chatroom, but with Phil so close to a solution, I'd like to see how this shakes out. I think it'll be nice to have a dedicated chatroom here if it can be worked out.

That said, using the regular chatroom might help drum up some activity here. Should we make a link to the regular chatroom for now and see what happed?

latest update.
well i got it nearly how i wanted it.
Looked into finding away to delete all the crap pages, and completely screwed the bugger up.
Now, it is time for me to do other things.
so i won't be able to do any more till tomorrow.
but at least you can have a look . you can make a post, but only the one at the moment before it goes bottom over breast.

I think your chat layout will be perfect. The only reason I can think of to make a copy here is in case someone (like me for a work project) wants to clone this site. It will allow the chat feature to work in the framework of a private site.

I am somewhat close to installing a minichat for the support site.
in the process i have discovered a bit of a serious flaw in its design implication that does not lend itself to implementation on an existing site.
However, it can be resolved, and i will do so, hopefully later tonight.
right now i need to walk away from the dam thing for a short while.

I just cloned this site and it took me a few minutes to figure out, but all I had to do was edit the code blocks and iframes on /chatcss:buttons and the iframe in the side bar to point to my site name and it seems to be working fine. I wonder if there's a way to work in a live template and %%site_name%% into those pages so it transports more easily.

Generally, it worked very well, but there are a couple of glitches. I fixed one bug in that the chatroom was redirecting back to a page that didn't exist (had to change /chatroom to /chat:_chatroom). I think I got it fixed properly on the package installer page too.

There's still an issue with Active Users being displayed and crashing into the chat posts. Plus the formatting of the posts doesn't quite match what Phil worked out here.

@Phil and/or @tsangk, could you take a look if you have time to see what needs to be tweaked? I can invite you and make you admins if necessary.